COVID-19 impact on MONITOOL project implementation

As everybody knows, the spread of the infection by the COVID-19 has been severely affected our lives and, in consequence, also to our planned activities on MONITOOL project.

All partner's institutions are closed and staff are working at home, except for very few people who carry out the critical authorized work.

In this sense, it's time to well organize all the pending MONITOOL works.

For example, a last experiment posed by IFREMER in order to determine metals on seawater samples taken from certain MONITOOL sites, in parallel with the DGT exposition and the filtered seawater analysis (ICP-MS and Voltammetry) under "stable" conditions, was planned for April 2020, as complementary field data to give consistency to DGT EQS determination. This task will be carried out now in the second half of 2020.

On the other hand, the MONITOOL Final Conference, which should have been held in Lisbon on May 2020, must be imperatively postponed. The new date is still pending, but it is most likely to take place in September this year. This event will be timed to coincide with the last Partner´s meeting.

Finally, this period of time will be used by partners to continue working on the processing of the data and publishing the main findings of the MONITOOL project in the more suitable science and technology journals. It is intended that, at least, four papers are ready to be published at project completion.

MONITOOL partnership wants to thank Interreg Atlantic Area program for the automatic extension on the project for 6 months due to the current COVID-19 pandemic situation.